Seems like an aging population explains most or all of the post-2000 downturn, no? We're currently at a 20 year high of the 25-54 age group's employment: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
As someone who frequently books campgrounds at the county, state, and national level, Recreation.gov provides by far the best user experience for browsing sites on a map and viewing calendar availability that I've encountered. Its fees don't seem noticeably higher than fees I encounter on other government booking systems. Maybe I'm being naive, but it doesn't seem too important to me that Booz Allen is collecting some of its payment as a part of booking fees rather than directly from government contracts. A government website that works this well seems worthy of praise to me!
Look, good websites are great. I’m glad you’re happy with the experience. But building good websites is not some special capability that should entitle you to large fractions of ongoing revenue from customers. Building decent websites in 2023 should be a competitive fee-for-delivery service, even for websites that have specialized functionality and large scale like auctions. Someone should pay you a (potentially large!) fee for building it and an ongoing maintenance/support fee. Nobody should be entitled to collect a huge rent amounting to any substantial fraction of all national park recreational fees just because they built some infrastructure, any more than the people who paved the roads leading to the national parks should be allowed to collect tolls on every driver passing through.
If your response is that websites are so hard to build that our government can’t spec out its requirements and get it built — and therefore just need to overpay by 10,000x for the privilege of having a decent user experience, then maybe we (technologists) need to go have a long look in the mirror and ask what we’ve done to make things so terrible.
It's much more likely that the government agency in charge of this had $4.99 to build the site, not even enough for Fivver.
But they have all the latitude in the world to sign "portion of the ticket price" contracts, and so they did.
It's not Booz's fault; it's the situation that lead this to (apparently) be the best option for the agency.
(This same crowd here wouldn't even turn over in their sleep if the same agency had contracted out building the site and ran it themselves on AWS and paid Amazon 3-5x what Booz is getting, mind you.)
It is perfectly fine to diagnose the pathology that led to this outcome. It is not ok for people to excuse it because “the website works fine for me!” Government agencies need an interface to communicate with taxpayers and “customers” in order to exist. In the 1960s that meant paper mail and customer service agents, and most government agencies were reasonably competent (if sluggish) at handling those technologies. In 2023 and beyond it means smoothly-working websites, and governments have decided to treat these as a weird, expensive mystery technology - long past the point where industry has made website design into something routine. The days when governments could budget $5 to agencies for tech development and/or expect them to spend 50x standard industry prices on broken government contractors are long behind us. And there is no room for this kind of predatory outsourcing. We need to demand a lot better.
Even if we see things as charitably as you outline (and well done for that) the contract could be a "portion of the ticket sales up to $X total."
I don't blame Booz for that (entirely). Somebody else had to sign that contract, too.
But if I'm going to lay into Booz, I have to look in the mirror myself. I have worked for employers that charge as much as they can get away with in a market that wasn't exactly fair. When incumbents spend almost unbelievable amounts to build a functioning legislative mote, then exploit that for all it's worth, you could call that "good business." And you can rationalize by saying, "If I don't, somebody else will, so it might as well be me who benefits." But the excuses seem pretty flimsy when historians catalog the damages.
Still, the biggest blame goes to the other signature on the contract.
I agree it's "not Booz's fault". That's the point of honest graft. It's the fault of our government for allowing them to have so much control over these junk fees.
I would argue that the cost is less in setting up than in running and maintaining a site at the scale of Recreation.gov. That includes aspects of customer support.
Many of these agencies are forced into uncompetitive compensation structures which means contracting out most, if not all, of their technical work.
A major part of the issue is the government contracting system. In an attempt at fairness, it has massive amounts of oversight burden. That is, in turn, a barrier to additional competition for the work.
> Its fees don't seem noticeably higher than fees I encounter on other government booking systems.
So what's the acceptable upper limit of rent we should be charged to use a website that's already built to use lands our taxes already paid to buy to a company who provides little-to-no ongoing service to us?
It's easy to get emotional about this. But when I try to be fair, I acknowledge that "little-to-no ongoing service" is probably not completely accurate.
There are storage systems, databases, app servers, etc. that all need some degree of constant care. I don't know what the scale or structure of those systems are, so it is difficult to say what that cost should be. Perhaps it qualifies as "little". It almost certainly does not qualify as "none".
Of course, the hardware and the labor might already be included in the taxes I pay. I don't know that either. I wonder how much work it would take to sort out all the different sources of revenue Booz has from this.
For most of Hacker News, it's easier to avoid the emotions that would come with actually looking at the horrible things corporations are doing to our society. You'll defend corporations no matter what, pretending to take the "rational" approach, because you benefit from corporations that are doing many of the same harms.
But being unemotional in the face of constant corporate destructive behaviors isn't rational or normal, it's effectively sociopathic. Yes, I'm emotional, because I have a conscience and I listen to it. You don't get to dismiss what I'm saying because it's emotional. Not being emotional when companies do shite like this is the problem. It's not my emotions that are the problem, it's your lack of emotions that's the problem. Where is your conscience? Why aren't you emotional when corporations do harmful things and profit?
> But when I try to be fair, I acknowledge that "little-to-no ongoing service" is probably not completely accurate.
Bro, I'm a freelance full stack web developer, and I've been the part-time sole developer for sites that serve millions of customers, because you don't need even one full-time dev to maintain a system to which you're not adding new features. There's literally nothing you have said I'm not aware of, and I'm saying "little-to-none" because that's accurate.
The largest costs here are hosting fees. If the system is at all efficient, that can easily be handled for <$10k/year, but let's just say $100k/year because even that amount is literally irrelevant. Millions of people book with the NPS yearly and pay a $6 fee. There is no way the money here comes even close to being reasonable.
You aren't trying to be fair. You're trying to defend corporations at any cost, like many folks on Hacker News. Your ideology is one of the most harmful forces in our society today.
> There are storage systems, databases, app servers, etc. that all need some degree of constant care. I don't know what the scale or structure of those systems are, so it is difficult to say what that cost should be. Perhaps it qualifies as "little". It almost certainly does not qualify as "none".
You could have this entire setup managed by AWS / GCP for < 1k a month. It's not a complicated site.
It sounds like your issue is with the federal government charging fees for the national parks, not booze Allen Hamilton charging a processing fee for it.
"by far the best... that I've ever encountered" is a terrible argument in support of a monopoly. It's legally impossible to have something better, so of course it's the best we know of.
'Exactly how much Booz Allen reaps from Recreation.gov is not publicly known, nor is how much it costs to operate Recreation.gov on an annual basis. The lawsuit contends that Recreation.gov handled 9 million transactions in 2021 and generates “tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars of revenue every year for Booz Allen, constituting a complete windfall.”' [1]
I'd be surprised if that revenue were below 100 million. A team of a couple dozen competent developers could certainly operate it for a fraction of that.
Rather, the incentives to extract ongoing revenue and increase the take as much as possible are better aligned, not delivering the best possible experience for the public. This is not some service ran at cost otherwise it simply wouldn't be done, therefore there is public money being wasted for private profit.
The fact that the US even has a booking system and restricted access to national parks is indicative of a larger issue, that issue likely being that the number of national parks you have is far too low, and that they are too distant from where people live. If you fixed these issues (which at this point would be politically difficult since it would likely require land reclamations, but not impossible), you might not have to restrict access to national parks.
I, for instance, live in the Helsinki region in Finland, which is a metropolitan area tightly nestled between two modest national parks, both within a reasonable distance by public transport, and both of which I can simply stroll into without any such restrictions or bureocracy. The US could, if there was willingness for it, strive to offer similar opportunities near its major cities. It's simply a matter of willingness.
The other issue is probably that some of your national parks are so iconic (e.g. yosemite) that they'd probably have too much demand even if the country was filled to the brim with alternatives, but you probably can't do much about that issue.
This interpretation really doesn't seem very realistic. The government can't create more grand canyons or mountain ranges, at least not without raising taxes a few percentage points.
The issue isn't that there are few parks for people to visit, the issue is that these parks are unique and highly popular. There are thousands of parks in the United States, there just aren't thousands of grand canyons, thermal geysers, or mountain ranges.
I live within a 5 hour drive of something like 20 national parks. I live within 60 minutes of several National Recreation areas, State Parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas with all sorts of different designations. I'm within a 60 minute walk of at least 4 popular campsites.
It is not my experience that the USA lacks in this respect.
But if you want to visit the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, or Zions, or many of these other places, your last paragraph is spot on. The policy of the State of Nevada has been that you cannot reserve campsites in state parks. I think that just changed within the last year for the two most popular state parks. If you want to camp in the Valley of Fire among the red rocks or petrified forest you now need a reservation. If you want to camp just outside the boundaries, there is no reservation required and no fee. Oh, yeah, and no potable water or restrooms, etc.
Note: the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, and Zions are not Nevada State Parks. And you'll have to wait another year now to catch Gold Fever at Buckland Station State Park[0].
Most national parks will allow you to "stroll"into them. And the US has quite a few national parks (as well as state parks" but she are more popular than others. It isn't like we can build another Grand Canyon.
It’s a pretty good website, but considering it’s replaced full-time humans arranging your reservations by hand for a fee of $0, I’m not seeing the fees as reasonable.
It feels a lot like economic rent, with Booz Allen positioning themselves between you and your land. You pay their fee not because the user experience was great, but because it’s the only way to camp at your favorite park.
I replaced my Fitbit Versa with a Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music and have been a huge fan. Many day battery, GPS for runs etc, can play music and podcasts from the watch.
As someone who used it frequently before and after, it’s not really much better or worse. The primary user impact I’ve noticed is that the ui is more “modern” (ie has more spacing between everything)
Unfortunately search in images never works for me in OneNote. I have quite a few PDF documents with scanned contracts as images and none of them are found by OneNote or OneDrive search.The content in the images of the PDF files are immediately available in search results on my Google Drive.
I'd say it's equivalent, but not a fantastic option. I think all it does is send over a different user agent for a desktop browser. On responsive web sites, I just see the same thing with the feature on as with it off. On sites that redirect based on UA, I've seen it take me to the desktop page instead.
I wish the "Request Desktop" option actually faked a typical screen size (say, 1280 x 800, 96dpi) and all the other attributes that would make a site think it's displaying on a desktop browser. It's frustrating to really want the desktop version, and have no way of doing that when the site is too "smart" for me.
I know what I'm in for (lots of zooming and panning). For some sites, it's the only way to reach certain features that the site didn't include in their mobile version.
It doesn't work on a lot of sites. The user agent is still mobile safari, and web devs often have bugs for that browser in a larger screen form factor. Needs a desktop user agent.
I wonder if the student loan/debt bubble will hit these towns hard (if it turns out to be a bubble). Spending on higher education seems like its gains are unsustainable.
It is unsustainable. US higher education costs have risen faster than health care. The fraction of graduates who are behind or deferring their student loan payments has been rising. Queue Admiral Ackbar: It's a trap!
Students and their parents need to have some difficult conversations: 1) How well prepared is the student for a given major? Remedial classes add cost but not credits toward the degree. 2) Does the student have a track record of finishing what they start? 3) Will the starting salary for graduates with that degree permit the student to pay their living expenses and their loan debt? 4) Are the time-to-finish estimates realistic? IIRC, the majority of students in 4 year programs actually take 5-6 years.
I grew up in one of these towns in the Midwest, and this is exactly what I fear for its future. The college tuition costs nearly as much as Harvard but the educational value is worse than that of a public university in many ways.
Valid counter to the article's premise, and leads me to a dumb question: why haven't more colleges attempted to cut costs in recent years, as tuitions and student debt continue to spiral?
First, the market clearly does not reward cheap education. A lot of prospective students and their parents are enamored with pricey colleges either for the status or for the perceived value. This is probably a result of cultural expectations lagging behind actual reality by a few decades.
Second, all the intermediary parties have no incentives to control cost. Student debt cannot be discharged under bankruptcy, so why would the lenders ever say no to any debt? They don’t care that the college is overpriced by a factor of 10 and the student will never pay off their debt fully, they’ll still pay 6-11% interest for the rest of their lives, which is highly lucrative for the lender.
Is there any argument why Taiwan should be treated as anything other than a normal, independent country? I know that China wants to claim sovereignty, but a want is not an argument. I don't mean this as a rhetorical question--I am curious if there is any coherent argument here?
From the perspective of any one given actor/organization, the coherent argument might be "we don't want to piss of China".
But to the spirit of your question, no there's no argument that's externally valid. The CCP has claims relating to it's legitimacy, security and territorial claims. They are not widely viewed as credible, but China has insisted on making Taiwan a red line issue so everybody else has to pretend like these claims might be legitimate.
At the end of the day it's a very large political entity trying to take complete control of a much smaller one against it's will. It's colonialism plain and simple.
It's really not that plain or simple. Any population that might have a claim to being "indigenous" to Taiwan has already been colonized by the Dutch and the Portuguese, then the Qing dynasty, then the Japanese, and finally the ROC, which is the sovereign entity that governs Taiwan today. If anything, the transition from Japanese to KMT rule was rather brutal and colonial, although Taiwan is a rather healthy democracy today and the current ruling faction, the Pan-Greens, have historically fought against that legacy.
although Taiwan is a rather healthy democracy today and the current ruling faction, the Pan-Greens, have historically fought against that legacy.
you must be kidding yourself. just looking at news happened in the last 72 hours
-A Dupty commissioner of ROC's Transitional Justice Commission openly instructed his men to launch political attacks against a key KMT party candidate, he also urged MPs from his own party to assist him. He further pointed out that his vision for the ROC's Transitional Justice Commission is the Eastern Depot [1] style secret police. His passionate speech was secretly recorded by a member from his own party and released to the public. Your favourite pan-green forces want Eastern Depot [1] style secret police to be re-installed, yet you choose to troll here that they are progressive and better than KMT. What a bloody joke!You have to wonder what happens if the tap was not released to the public.
There no link provided but you mean the Eastern Bureau? A historical 600 year old police force? Comes across as a strange reference to make regarding current affairs.
Doesn't every country have departments within their intelligence community that operate relatively away from the public eye. Seems quite uncontroversial to me without them breaking laws, perverting justice or other nastiness.
HN is not a place for political or nationalistic flamewar and you've been posting a lot of such comments. If you keep doing that we're going to have to ban you, so please stop.
If you read through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan , there are a lot of issues, like exactly who Japan surrendered to, and the status of the governments of China and Taiwan given that they were opposing sides in a civil war that never officially ended. There are those on Taiwan who believe that they are the rightful rulers of all China. My take on it is that Taiwan, China, and even the US can argue their claim to having sovereignty over Taiwan, but in the end, it will come down to balancing "possession is nine tenths of the law" against "might is right".
The official position of both governments (mainland and Taiwan) is that there is only one country called China, and it is made up of both the mainland and Taiwan. Of course your average Taiwanese citizen is unlikely to hold such a position, but I'm just looking at this at an official level to start.
From the mainland government's perspective, that country is the People's Republic of China, governing from Beijing. For Taiwan, that country is the Republic of China, currently governing from Taipei having fled the mainland. The civil war has never officially ended, and each lays claim to the others territory as the rightful owner.
This is the basis of the "One China Policy" that you might read about every now and then. The vast majority of countries around the world switched to recognising the PRC instead of the ROC many decades ago, and the PRC offers financial incentives for doing so, which matters to small countries, notably in the Pacific. They also threaten the opposite for anyone who recognises the ROC instead, or more recently, any entity that lists Taiwan as anything other than part of China.
Airlines were recently threatened by the PRC for listing Taiwan as a separate country instead of a region - I believe most capitulated. This is the key argument you are looking for at least in the context of corporations such as Apple, who seems to think they're big enough to stand up on this one. Qantas on the other hand, backed down immediately.
Beyond corporations though, more generally, it is not so much about China claiming sovereignty over Taiwan - it is about the opposite being the case as well. At the point where Taiwan renounces its claim on the mainland, China will consider it the first official step on the path to Taiwan's independence. It has repeatedly said that this is a red line it will not allow Taiwan to cross without a forceful response. Another red line, for example, being Taiwan's possession of nuclear weapons.
I believe Taiwan could have declared independence in the 1990s and come out on top in any military confrontation with the PRC. However, there was not enough support amongst the population at the time[1] - most people considered themselves "Chinese" as opposed to "Taiwanese". That is now starting to reverse, but IMO Taiwan is no longer in a position to successfully defend itself if the PRC decides to act. The US has given no guarantees it would defend Taiwan in the event of a unilateral declaration of independence.
So to sum up: Taiwan is not treated as a normal independent country by most entities because the PRC has enough clout (economically and militarily) to threaten those who wish to do so.
Taipei skyline.jpg
Taipei skyline.
Currency New Taiwan dollar (NT$)
NT$29.2 per US$ (Apr 2018)
Fiscal year
Calendar year
Trade organizations
WTO, APEC, ICC and others
(as Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu)
Statistics
GDP
Nominal: $571.5 billion
Taiwan's GDP counts for around 4% of the Chinese GDP, to give you more context, Chinese GDP growth slowed down to 6.8% pa, that is still creating 1.5 times of the entire GDP in Taiwan every 12 months.
using your logic here, please don't argue further more, otherwise you'd be arguing with yourself - who care about the tiny island called taiwan.
What I was saying is that it's far more likely in general Apple would be dealing with Taiwan, the world's 22nd largest economy, than Palestine, the 129th. That and the large microelectronics industry in Taiwan.
It wouldn't call it "propaganda." Countries routinely have territorial disputes. I get China is viewed as a competitor to American interests, but the situation in Taiwan is historically complex. It would be like if Texas or California unilaterally seceded from the U.S., various countries would recognize or not recognize their legitimacy as an independent nation.
It's more like if there was a communist revolution in the US followed by a civil war, with the anti-communists ending up holding Texas or California and establishing their own government there. The Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan, and Taiwan hasn't officially seceded.
your analogy is missing the most politically critical part -
the 1943 Cairo Declaration explicitly stated that Taiwan belongs to China and it should be "restored" to China. it is a part of the post-WWII world order.
The Republic of China was in control of Taiwan when they lost the Chinese Civil War to The Communist Party of China.
When the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan they did not have to file for asylum or apply for a Visa. Taiwan was part of China. The Communist Party is declaring when they won the civil war they gained control over all of China, including Taiwan.
This is the narrative for Taiwan not having sovereignty, and not necessary my own views.
As an outsider that seems like sour grapes. If they truly did win complete control then they would have taken control of Taiwan soon after the end of their Civil War.
Another way to look at it is if the Confederacy never surrendered to the union and instead retreated to Cuba and became the dominant political force on that island.
I don't think Confederacy ever cared to control all of U.S.
So this analogy might work better if Confederacy was the one who won, and Union retreated to Cuba.
Today, Cuba happens to be a highly desirable location (strategically, or for resources, or etc.). So Confederates, who now control continental U.S., want to maintain their claim on it.
Meanwhile, nowadays a majority of the people in USA (a government which controls only Cuba) consider themselves Cubans, and almost no one in USA cares about regaining control of continental U.S.
But Confederates feel that, if USA renounces control of continental U.S., it would be a step towards USA independence, which would further weaken Confederate claim over Cuba. So they pressure USA to keep referring to themselves as "USA" instead of "Cuba". Additionally, they think that the "one America" stance depends to some extent on USA retaining continental U.S. in its official borders. (But in reality, no USA citizens, aka Cubans, care about these borders continuing to include continental U.S.)
The KMT were the losers, like the Confederacy, but the CCP were the rebels, like the Confederacy. At the end of the day, both sought to control all of China, so I don't think it matters which side is which in this analogy.
I almost feel like control of Taiwan is more a matter of national pride for the PRC than geopolitics at this point. Yes, the PRC would love to get the USA out of the South China Sea, but there are already American forces in Japan that aren't leaving anytime soon. Yes, the PRC would love to add Taiwan to its territory, but it should be mostly happy enough just to continue building economic ties. However, both the government and the people see possession of Taiwan as unfinished business and this is what I think drives their dramatic reactions in cases like this Apple incident, which is what I was trying to illustrate with the analogy.
The Qing Dynasty annexed the island but was forced to give it up to the Japanese after the Sino-Japanese war. Their historical claim is debatable, but so is the RoC's occupation, imo.
This is as stupid as saying ROC is still a member of the UN simply because it is recognised by the UN chapter as a founding member of UN and permanent member of the UNSC.
How is this stupid? The PRC existed when Taiwan was given to the ROC. The borders (i.e. the real ones not the imaginary ones referenced by PRC and ROC laws) between the PRC and the ROC are unchanged in the last 69 years. So no it's quite clear that the Cairo declaration definitely does not support any claims of the PRC to Taiwan. Bringing up representation in the UN is irrelevant and if anything the only stupid thing said in this back and forth.
Perhaps there is disproportionate negative attention placed on the tech industry these days, but it is still reasonable to write an in-depth article like this that only focuses on one specific offending industry.
The trouble with this article is that’s not an “in-depth”. It is not based on scientific rigor, but rather on a certain assumption backed by the boasting of a certain B.J.Fogg.
Moreover, the observed behavior is certainly not something new to our present time.
If anecdotal evidences are of any use, then I can relate my own childhood experience. I was truly obsessed with computers in my teens, and avoided talking to my parents. The only difference is that this happened 25 years ago in post-Soviet Russia.
